We have seen the enemy, and he is us.  We began Romans considering with Paul how far humanity had fallen from our initial glory, our initial God-given grace.  Paul tells us we threw it all away, for what?  What supposed payoff?  Well, people will agree that the world is a mess.  Sure, we each have some things in our lives that we could be working on.  As for the notion that everything, including us, is entirely broken and sorely in need of God’s intervention?  Not everyone, even in the church, will affirm that.  We understand that people want to reserve a little something for themselves: a little independence, a little freedom, a little dignity, a little pride.  Paul is telling us that, in throwing aside the glory and grace, we lost our God-given goodness: we are no longer as we were created to be, and we cannot regain it.  The Giver will have to give it, again.  Yes, of course, we can point to instances and examples all around us of kindness, patience, selflessness, generosity, and self-restraint.  At the same time, we also see the opposite at work around us, and within.  Life is mixed, at best; we’ve done alright making safe, comfortable bubbles for ourselves.  One unforeseen or even foreseen event can explode it.

By way of examples of how tremendously out of order humanity has become, Paul then pointed to some behaviors, actions, and compulsions that make us squirm uncomfortably in church, especially with the young, tender ears of our young disciples here with us.  Beloved, it’s only a matter of time before they’re exposed; you know this.  You might be surprised, and deeply saddened, to find out what they’ve already been exposed to.  If they must be exposed to the sins and sinfulness of this world—and they must, in this society, in this America—I’d rather they be introduced to the topic here, than out there, where it’s not called depravity but presented as something cool, bold, praiseworthy, and so full of just plain, simple love.  We do a bang up job failing to equip our children for what their souls and faith will encounter, out there.  Let’s begin to do something faithful and strengthening for them about that.

Paul then develops some thoughts about righteousness—what depravity deprives us of.  If we’re all wrecks of humanity, and God requires the very best, how shall we ever become acceptable to God?  Paul had been raised in a time among a people who taught that good deeds and following the rules would make one acceptable to God.  Rituals make one acceptable.  Doing the right things, the required things.  Ritual is not relationship.  The religion was built upon performance.  Performance is measurable; the heart is not.

It wasn’t enough to claim to love the law, love the Word, love the Lord: one had to do the law, live the Word.  In his younger years, Paul strove to outperform them all.  He largely did.  Then, with blinding clarity, he discovered the uselessness and worthlessness of staking one’s claim to righteousness upon one’s performance.  God showed Paul his heart.  Just when Paul was fully convinced that he was doing what was most pleasing to God, honoring and glorifying God, God convicted Paul of persecuting God.  God showed Paul his blindness, then gave him God’s own light by which to see, by which to walk.  Walk with the Lord in the light of His Word.

It was Christ Jesus who called out to Paul, there on the road to Damascus.  At the end of the fourth chapter of Romans, Paul reminds us that it was Christ Jesus who “was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification” (4:25).  There is the solution God provides, the way God provides, the atonement and the righteousness God requires and provides.  We ask what would Jesus do.  Jesus did something for us we could not do, went somewhere we could not go.  This is the crucial, glorious fact about Jesus.  Sin makes justification impossible for us: sin shuts us out of the possibility of justification because sin kills our best self.  Sin isn’t something we do or that strangely, uncharacteristically happens to us, later at some point: Paul is telling us that all of us enter this life sinful: full of sin, saturated, soaked.  We say no, of course.

God requires our best.  So, God offers us Himself, through faith; faith remains possible.  We know that, very well.  God provides the way we could not make, the way we did not keep.  God dealt with our sin that made it impossible for Him to receive and accept us.  He dealt with our sin Himself in Jesus.  In taking the consequences of sin, the judgment against sin, upon Himself in Christ Jesus—the beloved, eternal Son, with whom the Father is well pleased—God takes upon Himself the consequences that otherwise must fall upon us.  The cross is the all-lovely, all-terrifying site of justice for God.

In Christ, those who come to faith are forgiven, justified, classified and received as acceptable to God.  Those who come to faith are forgiven: if only there were a way to make those words come vividly alive for us!  But God does that, too.  The one who died as a result of all our many sins, confessed and as yet not even acknowledged—God raised this one to life, “for our justification.”  God means to make us acceptable to Him.  We are acceptable to God only through Christ, faith in Christ.  This is what Jesus tells us when he says no one comes to the Father, except through Jesus.  The sacrifice restores the possibility of the relationship God wants to have with us; faith is the way to lay hold of the possibility and make it actual.  A good life isn’t enough for God, because no one, in God’s sight, is able to live the good life we talk about and aim for.  I just love that baking show, Nailed It.  That’s what our best looks like, to God.

Forgiven and justified.  Justified also means forgiven, forgiven and therefore acceptable, acceptable because forgiven.  “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:1).  We have been justified.  We did not justify ourselves by anything we have done or could do.  We are not justified because we are such good, kind, gentle people.  God justified us, in His sight, by what He did.  My peace I give to you; my peace I leave with you.  Jesus is the peace bringer, amen.  As we receive Jesus, God is no longer against us, exercising His just wrath upon us as those who live without concern for the Creator, those who live the gift of this life with no gratitude to or even curiosity about the Giver.  We are naturally adept at taking; giving comes more slowly.  We have peace with God; let us, therefore, have peace with God.  God invites us to lay hold of the gift.  He will not force it upon us.  We matter to him—Jesus is testimony to that, but let us never make the unhumble mistake of believing that God needs us.

The peace is given through Jesus, giving himself for us.  The way to peace, the way of peace, is the Jesus way.  So many want peace in their lives, just a little peace, which often means not so much stress, hassles, conflict, and difficulty.  A little more quiet.  Peace and quiet.  Beloved, I’ll be the first to affirm that those quiet moments are some of the best.  And I will be the first to affirm that those moments are just that: moments.  God’s peace is not some force field that keeps all the wear and tear of life at bay, leaving us in a happy, blissful bubble.  None of us experience anything like that because nothing like that exists . . . except, maybe by way of denial and narcotics, and those wear off.  Peace with God is what sees us through every challenge, every sorrow, every test, and all temptation.

We get banged up, along the way.  We do not always, in each situation, acquit ourselves well.  We’ll hear, as we recite from the Westminster Confession today, that “our best works are defiled and mixed with our weakness and imperfection[;] they cannot therefore even stand the scrutiny of God’s judgment [. . . .] It is not as though they were perfect in God’s sight but that God, looking on them in his Son, is pleased to accept and reward what is sincerely done, even though accompanied by much weakness and imperfection.”  We stumble, badly, plunge into the thickets after shadowy things, illusions.  We come back, stung, scratched, cut, bleeding, sad and ashamed again of our proclivity for self-deception, our gullibility and susceptibility to the illusions.  And we come back.  We come back because of grace, the assurance that God is now at peace with us, even if we aren’t always at peace or at peace with God.  Let us have peace with God.

Peace with God is given to us in Christ Jesus, “through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand” (5:2).  Faith in Christ is faith in what God does for us, through Christ, because we can’t.  And it must be done; God will be true to Himself; God will have justice.  Faith in Christ is faith in God’s goodness, God’s entire wisdom, and God’s strength: His ability to do what He says He will do, and that He has done it.  Faith ushers us into grace, and grace causes us to stand, fixed, firm—not because we ourselves, personally and entirely, are fixed and firm, but because Christ is.  How firm a foundation!  We stand in Christ, our solid rock, who endured all to obtain all for us.  We shall not be moved because he was moved, for us.

What did Christ obtain for us?  Forgiveness—we can never make too much of that.  But we’ll only make much of that when the reality of sin is entirely real for us: the reality of sin in the world, the sins we have committed, and the sin remaining, operative, in us.  It never goes away, in this life.  That’s why God gives us peace, in Christ.  God’s peace is how we endure what is otherwise unendurable.  God’s peace is how we become able to shift our focus from ourselves to God.  We spend a lot of  time—far too much time—focused on ourselves.  We are a natural focal point for our attention and concern.  And truly, we ought to have proper concern for ourselves.  But proper concern for ourselves begins with and centers upon concern for God.  Christ obtains forgiveness for us, peace for us, righteousness for us—in Christ, we enjoy a restored, renewing relationship with God; in Christ, we really can walk with God.

Christ obtains hope for us, a true, living hope: what Paul calls “the hope of the glory of God” (5:2).  The NLT fans out that phrase for us this way: “we confidently and joyfully look forward to sharing God’s glory.”  That’s still to come—this is why we hope for it and can realistically hope because we have the peace of Christ.  Sharing God’s glory—that is to experience, in an as-yet unknown, unseen way, the holy, powerful brilliance of God in all His majesty.  Even putting it like that doesn’t begin to chart what we’re talking about.  Today, we’re feeling our way into what is beyond us, comes from beyond, for us.  The endless, overflowing and complete excellencies of God: knowledge, power, goodness, beauty, joy, peace . . . on and on, and, in Christ, God is inviting each of us into all of it.  We really can hope to know it, feel it, for ourselves, because we have faith in Christ.  Which means we know what sin is and does, to us and to all creation; we know Christ’s death washes it all away, and washes us; we know that Christ’s resurrection means resurrection life for us, already and to come.  Sharing God’s glory means we feel the love of God and, responding, fall down in praise and thanksgiving.

At this point, Paul makes what may feel to us like a sudden jump.  In Christ, we can glory in knowing we will share God’s glory.  Amen.  But Paul also invites us, knowing all this, to “glory in our sufferings” (5:3).  So, stop right there a moment.  When suffering comes to us, we are supposed to say “Yay”?  Isn’t the point to avoid suffering, at all costs?  Isn’t that what medicine is all about, providing drugs so that we don’t need to feel any pain or discomfort?  We all drug ourselves with something to blunt the sense of suffering, sorrow, injustice, hurt, bitterness.   My drug might not be yours, nor yours mine.  And we also already know, because we’ve lived it and see people living it all around us, that growth, maturity, wisdom, strength—these come through meeting what life will throw at us and not running away.  Not drugging ourselves into insensibility.  Anyone here ever trained for a marathon?  Suffering, anybody?  Anyone worked two or more jobs to help make ends meet?  Nearly all of us have experienced deaths, experienced the end of a relationship we had told ourselves was so good.  We’ve had our hopes dashed and gotten nothing for all we’ve given.   And if we stop at the cross and don’t think there, don’t reflect there, all the cross will affirm for us is that this is what you get, in this world, for giving everything: nothing.

So soon as Jesus emerges from the waters of the Jordan like a fountain of life, the Spirit drives him into the wilderness.  No comfort in the wilderness.  No home, in the wilderness.  No family, in the wilderness.  No food.  No shelter.  What did the Spirit mean to do with Jesus, do for Jesus, out there, forty days and nights?  Years ago, I got the boys one of those Golden Books.  I’ll be reading it with Chloë, soon: The Story of Jesus.  It includes an illustration of the baptism—all sorts of greens and blues, whites, like earth: alive, alive, alive.  The next page shows Jesus out in the wilderness, where it looks like the surface of Venus or Mars: sand and rocks, dry, scorched hills and valleys as far as the eye can see, almost as far as the heart can reach.  The words on that page have always stuck with me: out there, in that dead absence, Jesus “thought about the good and evil in the world.”  He had time, out there.  The good lived for life.  The bad always brought hurt, sorrow, and death, like a valley of dry bones.

If Jesus had no resource, out there, he might never have come back; it might have unnerved him, demoralized him, killed him.  He wouldn’t have been the first to be overcome by the wilderness.  If Jesus had no resource, out there, he might have begun listening to the lies whispered from the dark crevices.  But Jesus had a resource, there in the wilderness: the Spirit—the Word, the Giver of Life.  What did the Word say to the Word, there?  Glory.  Grace.  Peace.  Sacrifice—give.  As God, Jesus could not suffer—not as we know suffering.  As a man, Jesus was liable to every suffering we know.  Some of us are better acquainted with suffering than we’d like.  The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness—the theatre of scarcity, poverty, deprivation—to affirm the crucial lesson: “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (5:3-4).  The courage of expectation.  What’s the opposite?  We’re familiar with it, maybe even personally, painfully: hopelessness, despair, unbelief, mistrust, doubt, fear unto cowardice.  Live for today.  Get what you can.  Don’t care.

Paul has walked us through the supreme importance of faith: trust that arises through a vital relationship.  Faith, trusting belief—this unlocks all God’s blessings for us.  Paul has just walked us through the supreme importance of hope: if we’ll let God do the guiding, the suffering that will come in this life can be redeemed—a way into a hope that rises above every reversal.  Hope, Paul tells us, Christian hope, stems from character, Christian character.  The Christian’s character reflects Christ’s character, so there is hope!  And character, as Jesus himself knows, emerges from a long process of perseverance: constructive, productive, thoughtful perseverance.  Not grim, bitter, hardening endurance.  Faith sees us through suffering, the suffering we all must endure in this life, anyway.  The good fruit of surviving suffering is resilient, durable hope: better is coming; there is better; there is glory, and we’re going there.

When people share their hopes, they are sharing their hurts.  Hope resides in the heart, and our hearts are largely mysteries, to us, as Jeremiah exclaimed so long ago.  We hope, mostly, because we know we are powerless to do anything to affect the outcome.  I hope the world won’t blow up tomorrow.  I hope the economy will turn around.  I hope I don’t get cancer.  I hope the kids will be alright.  Who really can do anything about any of that?  Well, you and I know: God.  So, we hope in God.  That just drives atheists, not a few agnostics, and secularly-minded folks nuts.  We’re the ones who must act!  The future is in our hands.  The world is in our hands.  Well, frankly, if that is true, we don’t have much of a record to be proud of.  To think that, somehow, the future will be brighter because the world is in our hands, seems sort of perverse and willfully foolish, a foolish hope and rather frightening, really.  Jesus told those listening, “If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels” (Mk 8:38, Lk 9:26).  There are those at work in our society and culture, shaping opinion and values, who would have us ashamed of the words of Jesus, ashamed of faith, ashamed of our hope.

Paul writes, not just to his fellow believers under pressure in Rome two thousand years ago, that the hope we have, “does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (5:5).  Ours is not a foolish hope, no naïve hope.  How shall we be ashamed of the Spirit, given to us, who is the conduit of God’s love?  God’s love is power.  God’s love is peace.  God’s love is life.  Only faith enables us to speak this way and to continue against the world and its ways, words, and weapons.  It’s faith that gives us the blessed assurance that our hope is the best, surest hope.  Paul tells us we know our hope is not silly or stupid because God’s love has been poured into us, into our hearts, that home of hope.  Poured—lavish, abundant.  God gives, meeting all our needs “according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:19).  The Spirit, the love of God, causes faith; the Spirit establishes hope.  Faith, hope, and love—all ours through the Spirit; all ours in Christ.